New details about killing of John Lennon

John Lennon's killer has provided new details of the murder of the former Beatle in his latest unsuccessful attempt for parole.

Mark David Chapman, 53, disputed media accounts that he called out to Lennon before shooting him in New York on December 8, 1980. “I don't recall saying, 'Mr. Lennon',” Chapman told the parole board. “I think that was something the press elaborated on. That didn't happen. He didn't turn. I shot him in the back,” he said.

Chapman fired five shots at Lennon, hitting him four times as the music legend and his wife, Yoko Ono, returned to their home in the Dakota apartment building in the Upper West Side, of Manhattan.

The former maintenance man said that he began planning the shooting three months earlier after seeing Lennon on the cover of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album.

“I just saw his face and it seemed like it all came together, the solution to my problem of being confused and feeling like a nobody,” he said, according to a newly released transcript. “And I said, 'Wouldn't it be something if I killed this individual? I would become famous, I would be something other than a nobody'. And that was my reasoning at the time.